Examopedia for all students

'myExamopedia' is a wikipedia style, collaborative exam revision site for students anywhere in the world.

The success of Examopedia in my own practice is evident from the Google search for the term "Examopedia". See below, a wonderwheel on the term, links to University of Portsmouth, where I work. It also links to "Exam Revision" related search results, basically showing that it has made its place in the Google Search results. These are the main ones.

I know you are not convinced by its success yet! Now thats perfectly normal. Take look at the report written by Engineering Subject Centre's Associate Phil Barker or read his blog post on Examopedia. For this work I was awarded 1 of 4 National Teaching Awards by the HEA's Engineering subject Centre. This work has also been reported in several JISC projects and report.

Some student voices and usage stats to my site are also avilable for you to see.

Now, if you are convinced and want to use it for your students or if you are a student want to use it with your friends before your exam the visit the free to all Examopedia site.

Figure: Examopedia - Conceptual diagram.

 Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.

To keep you up-to-date with any further developments and future innovations follow @myexamopedia on twitter.

Lastly, if you liked the site or have a suggesstion, please drop a line or two here :).

Thanks for you time.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is? (shorter version)

What is a CLE or Cloud Learning Environment? - The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution/organisation.
Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, where both share the same privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. This control is different from that in a PLE, a VLE or a PTE. If needed, the academic and the learner can have same rights to the shared content. For example, each "Google Site", can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.
This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learners in an institution. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if the tools used were chosen / managed by either the academics (PTE) or the learners (PLE) or for that matter the institution (VLE). Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and across institutions (CLE).
CLEs also make it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is?

I have been meaning to write this for quite some time now. To be honest, at some point in the run up to the ALT-C 2009 conference, I got this idea. There is a shorter version of this post too. There were many people at a session titled  "the VLE is Dead" hosted by James Clay, Josie Frase, Graham Attwell, Nick Sharrat and Steve Wheeler aka Timbuckteeth :).
Martin Weller blogged about the death of VLE/LMS too in Nov 2007. Scott Leislie coined a term Loosely coupled teaching a month before that. Martin's prediction about a move towards loosely coupled teaching tools has examples in practice today. However, there is more to it. Let me exaplain

PLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy full control on and choice of.  The tools within a PLE are most likely not used for the purpose of formal education of all learners within an educational institution. Each learner may use a different set of tools to support/enhance their informal learning.

VLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy very little control over, if any, or choice of and is an institutional system that is mostly likely for formal education. Academics and the institutions have the most control on this learning environment. Learners may have a say in it to some extent.

Loosely coupled.....to quote Scott, "course taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system." - again these tools the learner may have little control over but the academic is the owner and has most control/choice. As its non institutional learning environment, it is most likely to support informal teaching and learning but may be used for formal teaching and learning too. I have blogged on this type of tools as my own personal teaching environment.

CLE or Cloud Learning Environment....The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, who all equally share the privelages like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. Then this is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each "Google Site", for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if either the academics or the learners or for that matter the institution designed and developed the set of tools or bought it from any one supplier. Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and accross institutions.

CLEs also makes it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme. With a bit of search engine optimisation it could work magic in terms of making the educational material that sits on a CLE visible and usable by the rest of the world.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Web 3.0 and its role in Education

This post is in response to Timbuckteeth's (Steve Wheeler's) post on Web 3.0 and e-learning 3.0:



As far as I have experienced it, Web 2.0 is Read/Write/Collaborate (varying shades of it).



From 'create a site', to 'collaborate using a site' to 'search/mash-up the data from n sources to get the best the web has to offer on what you want' is more like what Web 3.0 will have to offer.


Web 3.0 may or may not have more mobile technologies. Mobile technologies do not change the nature of activity that web is used for only it access. So mobile or static access will happen for Web 3.0 - I am not so sure at this stage. I do not care either.


From an institutional prospective: The educational use of Web 3.0 will enable read/write/collaborate and re-present the information to learners in a more meaningful way than what current technologies allow - Filtering/searching/mash up etc will play a big role in all this.


From a learner's point of view: Web 3.0 will further what web 2.0 allowed (i.e. read/write/collaborate) and help learners 'personalise' the information that is created via interactions in Web 2.0 to best suit their own needs.


So far, mainly constructivist principles have found resonance with what e-learning (Web 2.0) has to offer. Web 1.0 was more suitable for Behaviourist principles (online material/ quizzes/feedback etc). Web 3.0 will make the content King, again. Thereby making the cognitive approach to teaching and learning more prominent alongside behaviourists and constructivist approaches.

Learners will use the web to suit their style of learning using their PLE. Institutions will benefit from being able to blend different pedagogies using the web as they need to cater for many different types of learners. Some academics will make use of this more than other giving way to Personal Teaching Environments (PTEs) that make use of the web in this way.

Next big thing will be the content created collaboratively via the web primed for the best use of its users (more personalised). Somewhere the PTE will meet the PLE and Web 3.0 need to make the meeting of these two as smooth as possible.

Personal Teaching Environment: Exam revision, Google Talk and Social Software

I blogged earlier about the Examopedia site I maintain. Currently this is open to acces by all. Next year I might have to move it behind the intranet. Will it be good or bad I wonder?

I am very happy with the site's use and performance so far. My students used it in the last few days before the exam as can be seen from webstats and Site behaviour. If only they used it throughout the semester ...

Intended us of the site was to tap into collaborative revision amongst the following other things:

1. provide quick feedback on how to improve exam answers
2. indicate how many marks an answer would get
3. encourage sharing and collaboration amongst the students on informal learning activities
4. reach out to the students who do not normally like taking part
5. communicate using google talk directly with the students
6. create a personalised teaching environment that is in my control - (is the VLE/LMS dead really? as Martin Weller said some time ago).

I think we are seeing a change yet again. The VLE era may well be over (for at least it is over). I like the fact that I can use powerful scripts that give me VLE like features to something simple as a wiki. For each course or innovation I can use a set of these scripts to do things I want to.
Forums that we use in my department are much better than those supported in our VLE. To be fair the new WebCTVista seems to have some new features that I would like to use. I wonder in this day and age where you can easily add functionalities to web pages WebCT's model of one size fits all product will stay for long? Besides the boundaries between academic generated content and student generated content are becoming less and less significant.
We are seeing a change where our roles are changing inevitably from teachers to facilitators be it in online distance learning or blended learning environments. In blended learning there will still be the need to be a teacher, however new skills will be needed to facilitate students and their work as more and more students and staff start using the read write web. It looks like I am talking about Web 3.0 (video link).
Comments welcome.

Google Talk tales

Thanks to Brian Kelly for introducing me to Google talk. Although it was for a completely different purpose which I never got to realise fully.

I have put the google talk code on my wiki/blog/forums and my students seem to find it useful and in just one day I have chated with two students. These students are not on my twitter network but after this session of chat they are wanting to joing me there too.

One slight drawback of this is you will never know who you are chatting to. Also you may find that you are spending a lot of time with them. You may need to define some ground rules with them for this type of support, such as days on which you will address questions from students in this way or some other personall preffered way. I find this satisfying that I can help students in a totally different way. Especially with my flexible working needs I think this is a bonus. I just need my boss to appericiate this. Given that he is a reasonable person I dont think I have to wait for long:).

All in all I think Iam selling my soul to Google.

Social Software for enhancing/supporting students exam revision

I am using a wiki with my students for exam revision. I should really be saying my students are using it for their exam revision. I only come in to provide feedback and an indicative mark so that they get an idea of what to write in the real exam a question similar to the one posted on the wiki.

Exams are fast approaching and many of these students will be using past exam papers for revision for their coming exams. Many a times in the past when I used to do the same for my exam, I would get stuck with a question or two and struggle to find the answer in time before the exam. I found group study was useful in such situation where we physically met and attempted to tap into the collective intelligence of our group. This was then and in the physical world.

Now I am experimenting the same in a virtual environment using a wiki. I am sure it will work The students seem hesitant to begin with but will see the benefit sooner or later. I have already one poster starting to use it and many reads have taken place. Let the snow ball roll.

Here is a link to this project of mine. Guess what i call it....Examopedia.

Twitter in HE Final year Project Supervision

A bit of background
I got introduced to Twitter through a course run by the OU (H806). Through this course I got to know about many interesting people whom I now follow on twitter (Matrin Weller, Grannie Conole amongst others).

Last year I had piloted e-logs for supervision of project students. The results were promising and students responded positively saying the amount of contact they got from me using the e-log and feedback mechanism was better than what other students were getting. For me, it meant a lot to be better informed about the progress of my students.

One thing was missing then. Twitter - an informal back channel for all students doing project with me. As soon as i heard about it, it automatically filled in that gap and I used twitter with my students for project stupervision.

How to use twitter for Project supervision

There are a lot of things that all my project students do each year this includes the process of planning, organising and doing the project. Up untill now these students would work in isolation, reinventing the wheel all by themselves again. Some students form groups on their own and meet and discuss their studies but not every one gets this opportunity. Being my students they have an added layer of commonality in their projects - GSM/Communication/web/etc - the things that I am interested in.

However, projects tends to be a one person battle. Students may feel lonely and isolated during their project phase.

Here is where I bring in Twitter. I have always belived that friends/communities are formed easily when people are going through similar events that bring with them similar challenges on all involved. Here the target group is project students supervised by myself and I use twitter with them to share with each other their current challenge(s).

We all follow each other. We regualrly post "what we are doing?". We read these short messages and try to help each other. Simple.

For example, A student posted "am stuck with this modem not working" another finds that he has used the same modem and suggests few things to try. I also step in to help. With so many suggestions the problem got solved quickly. Others see this happening and the community feelings grows and they join in too.

For the purpose of supervison I am also using a wiki with these students and they update their project plan progress status on that wiki, apart from this they also put docuements for me to provide feedback.

I have reduced the frequency of the face to face meeting (once in two weeks as opposed to every week) as a result. Blending modes of contact seems to work and my role of being s supervisor cum facilitator is made easier. I am not the only one guding the students they help each other.

I presented this work at the EdMedia Conference in Vienna in 2008.